I Attended John Stevenson’s great talk and workshop at Monday night’s Software Testing Club Atlanta. I’m happy to report the meeting had about 15 in-person attendees and zero virtual attendees. Maybe someone read my post.

John is a thoughtful and passionate tester. He managed to hold our attention for 3 hours! Here are the highlights from my notes:

The human brain can store 3TBs of information; This is only 1 millionth of the new information released on the internet every day.

Over stimulation leads to mental illness.

John showed us a picture and asked what we saw. We saw a tree, flowers, the sun, etc. Then John told us the picture was randomly generated. The point? People see patterns even when they don’t exist. Presumably to make sense out of information overload.

Don’t tell your testing stories with numbers. “A statistician drowned while crossing a river with an average depth of 3 feet”; Isn’t that like, “99 percent of my tests passed”?

Don’t be a tester that waits until testing “is done” to communicate the results. Communicate the test results you collected today? I love this and plan to blog about it.

Testers, stop following the same routines. Try doing something different. You might end up discovering new information.

Testers, stop hiding what you do. Get better at transparency and explaining your testing. Put your tests on a public wiki.

Don’t fear mistakes. But do learn from them. This is how children learn. Play.

(Testing specific) Make your testing commitments short so you can throw them away without losing much. Don’t write some elaborate test that takes a week to write because it just might turn out to be the wrong test.

You spend a 3rd of your life at work. Figure out how to enjoy work.

John led us through a series of group activities including the following:

Who am I?

My typical day: get up, maybe hit the gym, drop my kids off at daycare, listen to a podcast or public radio, do not drink coffee (I kicked it), test software or help others test it, break for lunch and a Euro-board game, try to improve the way we test, walk the dog and kids, enjoy a meal with Melissa, an IPA, and a movie/TV show, look forward to a weekend of hanging out with my daughter Josie, son Haakon, and perhaps a woodworking or woodturning project.